eaving out of the question his enmity
towards the House of Borgia, which will transpire later. For him a ben
trovato was as good matter as a truth, or better. He measured its value
by its piquancy, by its adaptability to epigrammatic rhymes.

Conceive the heartlessness of the man who, at the moment of Alexander's
awful grief at the murder of his son--a grief which so moved even
his enemies that the bitter Savonarola, and the scarcely less bitter
Cardinal della Rovere, wrote to condole with him--could pen that
terrible epigram:

Piscatorem hominum ne te non, Sexte, putemus,
Piscaris notum retibus ecce tuum.

Consider the ribaldry of that, and ask yourselves whether this is a man
who would immolate the chance of a witticism upon the altar of Truth.

It is significant that Sanazzaro, for what he may be worth, confines
himself to the gossip of incest. Nowhere does he mention that Cesare was
the murderer, and we think that his silence upon the matter, if it shows
anything, shows that Cesare's guilt was not so very much the "general
opinion of the day," as Gregorovius asks us to believe.

CAPPELLO was not in Rome at the time of the murder, nor until three
years later, when he merely repeated the rumour that had first sprung up
some eight months after the crime.

The precise value of his famous "relation" (in which this matter is
recorded, and to which we shall return in its proper place) and the
spirit that actuated him is revealed in another accusation of murder
which he levels at Cesare, an accusation which, of course, has also been
widely disseminated upon no better authority than his own. It is Capello
who tells us that Cesare stabbed the chamberlain Perrotto in the Pope's
very arms; he adds the details that the man had fled thither for shelter
from Cesare's fury, and that the blood of him, when he was stabbed,
spurted up into the very face of the Pope. Where he got the story is
not readily surmised--unless it be assumed that he evolved it out of his
feelings for the Borgias. The only contemporary accounts of the death of
this Perrotto--or Pedro Caldes, as was his real name--state that he fell
by accident into the Tiber and was drowned.

Burchard, who could not have failed to know if the stabbing story had
been true, and would not have failed to report it, chronicles the
fact that Perrotto was fished out of Tiber, having fallen in six days
earlier--"non libenter." This statement, coming from the pen of th